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Category: Mobile

This category features articles on best and emerging practices for responsive website design, Web apps and native apps. While the mobile Web is still in it’s infancy, we can learn from the experiences of professionals who are working on mobile every day. Curated by Derek Allard. Subscribe to the RSS-Feed.

Pull-to-refresh is one of the most popular gestures in mobile applications right now. It’s easy to use, natural and so intuitive that it is hard to imagine refreshing a page without it. In 2010, Loren Brichter created Tweetie, one of numerous Twitter applications. Diving into the pool of similar applications, you won’t see much difference among them; but Loren’s Tweetie stood out then.

It was one simple animation that changed the game — pull-to-refresh, an absolute innovation for the time. No wonder Twitter didn’t hesitate to buy Tweetie and hire Loren Brichter. Wise choice! As time went on, more and more developers integrated this gesture into their applications, and finally, Apple itself brought pull-to-refresh to its system application Mail, to the joy of people who value usability.

The mobile app market is growing faster than a beanstalk. The industry is huge and growing daily, and there is no end in sight. Expectedly, the mobile developer population has boomed, and the number of mobile apps in the market has hit new heights. The revenue generated by the global mobile app industry has skyrocketed.

Hybrid monetization models, such as in-app ads and in-app purchases, are quickly gaining popularity in the business world. Most studies show that in-app advertising is set to be a key driver of mobile growth over the coming years (see Statista’s, IHS Markit’s and Forbes’s reports).

Many criticize gestural controls as being unintuitive and unnecessary. Despite this, widespread adoption is underway already, and the UI design world is burning the candle at both ends to develop solutions that are instinctively tactile. The challenges here are those of novelty.

Even though gestural controls have been around since the early 1980s and have enjoyed a level of ubiquity since the early 2000s, designers are still in the beta-testing phase of making gestural controls intuitive for everyday use.

In a recent sales meeting for a prospective healthcare client, our team at Mad*Pow found ourselves answering an all-too-familiar question. We had covered the fundamental approach of user-centered design, agreed on leading with research and strategy, and everything was going smoothly. Just as we were wrapping up, the head of their team suddenly asked, "Oh, you guys design mobile-first, right?"

Well, that's a difficult question to answer. While the concept of mobile-first began as a philosophy to help prioritize content and ensure positive, device-agnostic experiences, budgetary and scheduling constraints often result in mobile-first meaning mobile-only.

Color is arguably the second most important aspect of your app, after functionality. The human to computer interaction is heavily based on interacting with graphical UI elements, and color plays a critical role in this interaction.

It helps users see and interpret your app's content, interact with the correct elements, and understand actions. Every app has a color scheme, and it uses the primary colors for its main areas.

Will the resources spent implementing app indexing for Google search be a boon or a bust for your app’s traffic? In this article, I’ll take you through a case study for app indexing at our company, the results of which may surprise you.

App indexing is one of the hottest topics in SEO right now, and in some sense for good reason. Google has only been indexing apps for everyone for a little more than two years, and with only 30% of apps being indexed there is huge potential for websites to draw additional search traffic to their apps.

Creating that singular piece of graphic design that users will first interact with each time they encounter your product can be intimidating. A beautiful, identifiable and memorable app icon can have a huge impact on the popularity and success of the app. But how exactly does one make a "good" app icon? What does that even mean?

Fear not, I've put together some tips and advice to help answer these questions and to guide you on your way to designing great app icons. I've been designing, making resources and giving talks about icon design for the past couple of years. In this article, and in the video at the end, I'll sum up what I've learned about this amazing craft.

The most popular mobile operating system is known to be Android. One of the main reasons for its popularity is its ability to run on a huge number of devices, not only on phones and tablets. We find Android on TVs, watches, cars, even fridges and mirrors.

Android Wear is the version of the operating system specifically designed to extend the Android platform to wearables, with particular attention to smartwatches. These devices allow the user to consume information in a completely different way than traditional handheld devices: Data is presented at the right time depending on the user's context, and interaction is less invasive and time-consuming than in a phone app.

When designing a landing page to promote a product or service online, you're ultimately pointing users toward one goal. That goal most often relates to generating business via sales or leads. You may want users to purchase a product immediately, or you may simply want them to sign up for a mailing list. Whatever the goal, you want to ensure that every piece of the user experience works toward fulfilling that goal.

If you don't yet have goals in mind, start by defining goals. Are you seeking to generate a 10% increase in qualified leads? Are you looking to build sales by 20%? Establishing clear key performance indicators based on what will benefit your business will ultimately help you understand how to properly approach a landing page.

Back in 2007, the world met the iPhone for the very first time. After Apple’s product debut, it took less than six months for work to begin on PhoneGap, which would become one of the first and most adopted frameworks for hybrid mobile app development — that is, for apps written simultaneously for multiple platforms using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, rather than coded in native languages.

When compared with the prospect of learning an entirely new language and development environment in order to program iOS (and soon Android) apps, the appeal of this type of development to the already huge population of web developers in the world was palpable.

Apple taught us, "There's an app for that." And we believed it. Why wouldn't we? But time has passed since 2009. Our mobile users have gotten more mature and are starting to weigh having space for new photos against installing your big fat e-commerce app. Meanwhile, mobile browsers have also improved. New APIs are being supported, and they will bring native app-like functionality to the mobile browser.

We can now access video and audio and use WebRTC to build a live video-chat web apps directly in the browser, no native app or plugin required. We can build progressive web apps that bring users an almost native app experience, with a launch icon, notifications, offline support and more. Using geolocation, battery status, ambient light detection, Bluetooth and the physical web, we can even go beyond responsive web design and build websites that will automagically adapt to users' needs and context.

Have you ever wondered what it takes to create a SpriteKit game? Do buttons seem like a bigger task than they should be? Ever wonder how to persist settings in a game? Game-making has never been easier on iOS since the introduction of SpriteKit. In part three of this three-part series, we will finish up our RainCat game and complete our introduction to SpriteKit.

If you missed out on the previous lesson, you can catch up by getting the code on GitHub. Remember that this tutorial requires Xcode 8 and Swift 3.

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